Part 9 (1/2)

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual pa.s.sion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Moliere or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all.

It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_.

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Beroul); Mary of France, _Lais_.

Dante, _Divina Commedia_.

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_.

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prevost, _Manon Lescaut_.

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_.

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c..

Victor Hugo, _Legende des Siecles_.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human a.s.sociation. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed ill.u.s.trated--unfortunately ill.u.s.trated as it happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated.

Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.

SECTION I.--UNITY OF CHARACTER

There is a certain unity of character running through all civilization, and indeed through all humanity. Certain fundamental inst.i.tutions and principles of organization are common to East and West, to the ancient and modern world, to civilization and savagery, and there is not the least evidence that the similarities are the result of historic connexion. On the contrary, they arise from a human nature which is fundamentally the same, adjusting itself to conditions of life which are fundamentally the same. But of course it is only the broadest and most general characters that are thus common to all the world. Within them there is every sort and degree of specific difference. There are types within types, worlds within worlds, and what we call Western civilization is one of these. That is to say, it is at the present day a family or group of nations sharing in common certain things which distinguish it from the rest of the world, such things, for instance, as a certain degree of social order, a certain outlook upon life, certain fundamentals of religion and ethics, and an industrial organization based on applied science. Now to mention any of these points is at once to provoke a criticism. In each respect, it will be said, the nations of Western Europe and the lands that have been colonized from them differ vastly among themselves. The social order of Germany is by no means that of England. The industrial development of southern Italy is very different from that of Belgium. The Prussian outlook upon life--this in particular will be emphasized just now--is quite another thing from the French. This is true enough, but once again it means only that there are further specific differences within the genus. We could pursue the differences as far down as we like. For the United Kingdom, say, is by no means one h.o.m.ogeneous whole. Even within England alone deep contrasts reveal themselves between the agricultural South and the industrial North. Yet we do not hesitate to think of the English character, English inst.i.tutions, the English type as distinct from the rest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a real unity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higher remove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper and wider differences that appear in the various centres of Western civilization.

SECTION II.--UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction.

That is why it is in the ma.s.s a community of ideas, for ideas pa.s.s from man to man and from nation to nation more readily than inst.i.tutions, more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic const.i.tution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its international character, for there are constantly arising local and temporary dictators, arbiters of fas.h.i.+on in the ideas of politics, philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.